This invention relates to interconnecting multiple patient care devices to a central location (such as a nurses' station) for observation and control.
A wide variety of patient care devices (PCDs) are currently available. Examples include vital signs monitors (which measure such parameters as ECG, non-invasive and invasive blood pressure, pulse oximetry, etc.), ventilators, and infusion pumps. PCDs typically are not permanently installed beside each bed in every hospital room in the general care areas of the hospital. One reason is, of course, the expense of such an arrangement, but another, equally practical reason is that patients who are cared for in these areas generally do not require routine use of PCDs.
Often, vital signs monitoring and use of infusion pumps are necessary temporarily, for example, for a few hours after the patient returns to the room from surgery. This is typically accomplished with portable PCDs brought to the patient's bedside. Thus, portable PCDs are used in general care areas on an ad hoc basis and it is common for a given PCD to be used in several rooms over the course of a few days. It therefore is difficult for a health care provider to determine the locations of the PCDs and of the patients who are using them, other than by physically looking in every room on the floor. Moreover, it is often helpful to a patient's recovery process to allow the patient to ambulate during the period that he or she is connected to the PCD; locating such a patient is usually done visually by searching the hallways.
General care patients that are using the PCDs are typically the most acute (i.e., medically unstable) patients on the floor (i.e., the patients that bear the closest monitoring by the floor's staff of health care providers). Concomitantly, the presence of a PCD at a bedside serves as a flag to indicate that the patient should be monitored carefully. But because the PCDs are located inside of the room, they often cannot be seen from the nurses' station, and alarms generated by the PCDs (for example, warning that the patient's cardiac functions have fallen outside of preset limits) may not be easily detected. Consequently, the patient sometimes is moved to another room that is closer to the nurses' station to reduce the possibility that alarms may go undetected.
An alternative is to move the patient to a specialized, advanced care unit, such as an intensive care unit (ICU) or "stepdown" unit for the short time that vital signs monitoring is needed. In the ICU, special purpose devices dedicated to, e.g., ECG monitoring, are permanently mounted in each patient's cubicle. The devices are connected via a private network (i.e., a network having a communication protocol not available for general purpose use) to special purpose displays located at the nurses' station so that all of the devices can be observed centrally. The displays typically can only display limited information (e.g., heart waveforms and heart rate) and are thus unsuitable for general purpose use. Moreover, the patients generally cannot ambulate throughout the unit while connected to the monitoring devices.
Ambulation is possible in stepdown units, which generally monitor, by RF medical telemetry, exclusively patients' electrocardiogram (ECG). ECG RF transmitters worn by the patients transmit ECG data to antennas connected to a central nurses' station for observation. The telemetry antenna is permanently mounted near the patients' rooms and hard-wired to the nurses' station.